OnePlus has the weirdest Twitter challenge right now involving drinking straws and suction

While OnePlus is no stranger to unorthodox advertising methods, its latest is perhaps the most unabashed attempt at trying to go viral. The "$1000 Straw Challenge" will give the cash to the user who can transfer 8 fl. oz. of water from one cup to another cup the fastest using a regular thin straw and then a thicker boba straw. Users must then post the video on Twitter with the appropriate tags as stated in the official rules here.

The entire purpose of the challenge is to demonstrate the difference between UFS 2.1 and UFS 3.0 (Universal Flash Storage) technology which is often overlooked by anyone outside of smartphone enthusiasts. UFS defines a set of specifications for flash storage that all consumer smartphones rely on with the latest version (UFS 3.0) promising a transfer rate of up to 2900 MB/s compared to 1200 MB/s on smartphones running on UFS 2.1. The regular thin straw and thicker boba straw are therefore easily understandable metaphors to get the point across.

Regardless of how you may feel about OnePlus' marketing ploys, there's no question that transfer rates on the OnePlus 7 Pro are some of the fastest we've seen on a smartphone. Its UFS 3.0 flash storage returns sequential read and write rates of 1468 MB/s and 387 MB/s, respectively, compared to just 811.17 MB/s and 249 MB/s on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus equipped with UFS 2.1 flash. It's been a major selling point for the OnePlus 7 Pro at least until UFS 3.0 flash inevitably lands on more competing devices.